Off the Mangrove Coast (Ss) (2000) Page 5

  Old Man White turned away, growling something into his mustache. He was a testy old guy, and when he got sore that mustache looked like a porcupine’s back.

  “What’s the matter with that guy?” Sleeth said. “He acts like he was sore about something?”

  “It’s checkers,” I said. “That’s Old Man White, the best checker player around here. Mac and Slim are the only two who can even make it interesting, and they’re gone. He’s sour for a week when he misses a game.”

  “Hell, I’ll play with him!”

  “He won’t even listen to you. He won’t play nobody unless they got some stuff.”

  “We’ll see. Maybe I can give him a game.”

  Sleeth got up and walked over. The old man had his book out and was arranging his men on the board. He never used regular checkers himself. He used bottle tops, and always carried them in his pocket. “How about a game?” Sleeth says. Old Man White growled something under his breath about not wanting to teach anybody; he didn’t even look up. He gets the checkers set up, and pretty soon he starts to move. It seems these guys that play checkers have several different openings they favor, each one of them named. Anyway, when the old man starts to move, Sleeth watches him.

  “The Old Fourteenth, huh? You like that? I like the Laird and Lady best.”

  Old Man White stops in the middle of a move and looks up, frowning. “You play checkers?” he said. “Sure, I just asked you for a game!” “Sit down, sit down. I’ll play you three games.” Well, it was pitiful. I’m telling you it was slaughter. If the old man hadn’t been so proud, everything might have been different, but checkers was his life, his religion; and Sleeth beat him.

  It wasn’t so much that he beat him; it was the way he beat him. It was like playing with a child. Sleeth beat him five times running, and the old man was fit to be tied. And the madder he got, the worse he played.

  Dick said afterward that if Sleeth hadn’t talked so much, the old man might have had a chance. You see, Old Man White took plenty of time to study each move, sometimes ten minutes or more. Sleeth just sat there gabbing with us, sitting sideways in the chair, and never looking at the board except to move. He’d talk, talk about women, ships, ports, liquor, fighters, everything. Then, the old man would move and Sleeth would turn, glance at the board, and slide a piece. It seemed like when he looked at the board, he saw all the moves that had been made, and all that could be made. He never seemed to think; he never seemed to pause; he just moved.

  Well, it rattled the old man. He was sort of shoved off balance by it. All the time, Sleeth was talking, and sometimes when he moved, it would be right in the middle of a sentence. Half the time, he scarcely looked at the board.

  Then, there was a crowd around. Old Man White being beat was enough to draw a crowd, and the gang all liked Sleeth. He was a good guy. Easy with his dough, always having a laugh on somebody or with somebody, and just naturally a right guy. But I felt sorry for the old man. It meant so much to him, and he’d been king-bee around the docks so long, and treating everybody with contempt if they weren’t good at checkers. If he had even been able to make it tough for Sleeth, it would have been different, but he couldn’t even give him a game. His memory for moves seemed to desert him, and the madder he got and the harder he tried, the more hopeless it was.

  It went on for days. It got so Sleeth didn’t want to play him. He’d avoid him purposely, because the old man was so stirred up about it. Once Old Man White jumped up in the middle of a game and hurled the board clear across the room. Then he stalked out, mad as a wet hen, but just about as helpless as an Armenian peddler with both arms busted.

  Then he’d come back. He’d always come back and insist Sleeth play him some more. He followed Sleeth around town, cornering him to play, each time sure he could beat him, but he never could.

  We should have seen it coming, for the old man got to acting queer. Checkers was an obsession with him. Now he sometimes wouldn’t come around for days, and when he did, he didn’t seem anxious to play anymore. Once he played with Oriental Slim, who was back in town, but Slim beat him too.

  That was the finishing touch. It might have been the one game out of ten that Slim usually won, but it hit the old man where he lived. I guess maybe he figured he , couldn’t play anymore. Without even a word, he got up and went out.

  A couple of mornings later, I got a call from Brennan to help load a freighter bound out for the Far East. I’d quit my job on the tug, sick of always going out but never getting any place, and had been long shoring a little and waiting for a ship to China. This looked like a chance to see if they’d be hiring; so I went over to the ship at Terminal Island, and reported to Brennan.

  The first person I saw was Sleeth. He was working on the same job. While we were talking, another ferry came over and Old Man White got off. He was running a steam winch for the crew that day, and I saw him glance at Sleeth. It made me nervous to think of those two guys on the same job. In a dangerous business like long shoring that is, a business where a guy can get smashed up so easy it looked like trouble.

  It was after four in the afternoon before anything happened. We had finished loading the lower hold through No. 4 hatch, and were putting the strong-backs in place so we could cover the ‘tween decks hatchway. I was on deck waiting until they got those braces in place before I went down to lay the decking over them. I didn’t want to be crawling down a ladder with one of those big steel beams swinging in the hatchway around me. Old Man White was a good hand at a winch, but too many things can happen. We were almost through for the day as we weren’t to load the upper hold ‘til morning.

  A good winch-driver doesn’t need signals from the hatch-tender to know where his load is. It may be out of Isight down below the main deck, but he can tell by the feel of it and the position of the boom about where it is. But sometimes on those old winches, the steam wouldn’t come on even, and once in a while there would be a surge of power that would make them do unaccountable things without a good hand driving. Now Old Man White was a good hand. Nevertheless, I stopped by the hatch coaming and watched.

  It happened so quick that there wasn’t anything anyone could have done. Things like that always happen quick, and if you move, it is usually by instinct. Maybe the luckiest break Sleeth ever got was he was light on his feet.

  The strong-back was out over the hatch, and Old Man White was easing it down carefully. When it settled toward the ‘tween decks hatchway, Sleeth caught one end and Hansen the other. It was necessary for a man to stand at each end and guide the strong-back into the notch where it had to fit to support the floor of the upper hold. Right behind Sleeth was a big steel upright, and as Old Man White began to lower away, I got nervous. It always made me nervous to think that a wrong move by the winch-driver, or a wrong signal from the hatch-tender spotting for him, and the man with that post at his back was due to get hurt.

  Sleeth caught the end of the strong-back in both hands and it settled gradually, with the old winch puffing along easy like Just then I happened to glance up, and something made me notice Old Man White’s face.

  He was as white as death, and I could see the muscles at the corner of his jaw set hard. Then, all of a sudden, that strong-back lunged toward Sleeth.

  It all happened so quick, you could scarcely catch a breath. Sleeth must have remembered Old Man White was on that winch, or maybe it was one of those queer hunches. As for me, I know that in the split second when that strong-back lunged toward him, the thought flashed through my mind, “Sleeth. It’s your move!”

  And he did move, almost like in the checker games. It was as if he had a map of the whole situation in his mind. One moment he was doing one thing and the next…

  He leaped sideways and the end of that big steel strong-back hit that stanchion with a crash that you could have heard in Sarawak; then the butt swung around and came within an eyelash of knocking Hansen into the hold, and I just stood there with my eyes on that stanchion thinking how Sleeth would have been m
ashed into jelly if he hadn’t moved like Nijinsky.

  The hatch-tender was yelling his head off, and slowly Old Man White took up the tension on the strong-back and swung her into place again. If it had been me, I’d never have touched that thing again, but Sleeth was there, and the strong-back settled into place as pretty as you could wish. Only then could I see that Sleeth’s face was white and his hand was shaking.

  When he came on deck, he was cool as could be. Old Man White was sitting behind that winch all heaped up like a sack of old clothes. Sleeth looked at him then, grinned a little, and said, sort of offhand, “You nearly had the move on me that time, Mr. White!”

  There were four of us there, at the back end of creation, four of the devil’s own, and a hard lot by any man’s count. We’d come together the way men will when on the beach, the idea cropping up out of an idle conversation. We’d nothing better to do; all of us being fools or worse, so we borrowed a boat off the Nine Islands and headed out to sea.

  Did you ever cross the South China Sea in a forty-foot boat during the typhoon season? No picnic certainly, nor any job for a churchgoing son; more for the likes of us, who mattered to no one, and in a stolen boat, at that.

  Now, all of us were used to playing it alone. We’d worked aboard ship and other places, sharing our labors with other men, but the truth was, each was biding his own thoughts, and watching the others.

  There was Limey Johnson, from Liverpool, and Smoke Bassett from Port au Prince, and there was Long Jack from Sydney, and there was me, the youngest of the lot, at loose ends and wandering in a strange land.

  Wandering always. Twenty-two years old, I was, with five years of riding freights, working in mines or lumber camps, and prizefighting in small clubs in towns that I never saw by daylight.

  I’d had my share of the smell of coal smoke and cinders in the rain, the roar of a freight and the driving run-and-catch of a speeding train in the night, and then the sun coming up over the desert or going down over the sea, and the islands looming up and the taste of salt spray on my lips and the sound of bow wash about the hull. There had been nights in the wheelhouse with only the glow from the compass and out there beyond the bow the black, glassy sea rolling its waves up from the long sweep of the Pacific … or the Atlantic.

  In those years I’d been wandering from restlessness but also from poverty. However, I had no poverty of experience and in that I was satisfied.

  It was Limey Johnson who told us the story of the freighter sinking ; a ship with fifty thousand dollars in the captain’s safe and nobody who knew it was there anymore … nobody but him.

  Fifty thousand dollars … and we were broke. Fifty thousand lying in a bare ten fathoms, easy for the taking. Fifty thousand split four ways. A nice stake, and a nice bit of money for the girls and the bars in Singapore or Shanghai … or maybe Paris.

  Twelve thousand five hundred dollars a piece … if we all made it. And that was a point to be thought upon, for if only two should live … twenty-five thousand dollars … and who can say what can or cannot happen in the wash of a weedy sea ? Who can say what is the destiny of any man? Who could say how much some of us were thinking of lending a hand to fate?

  Macao was behind us and the long roll of the sea began, and we had a fair wind and a good run away from land before the sun broke upon the waves. Oh, it was gamble enough, but the Portuguese are an easygoing people. They would be slow in starting the search; there were many who might steal a boat in Macao … and logically, they would look toward China first. For who, they would ask themselves, would be fools enough to dare the South China Sea in such a boat; to dare the South China Sea in the season of the winds?

  She took to the sea, that ketch, like a baby to a mother’s breast, like a Liverpool Irishman to a bottle. She took to the sea and we headed south and away, with a bearing toward the east. The wind held with us, for the devil takes care of his own, and when again the sun went down we had left miles behind and were far along on our way. In the night, the wind held fair and true and when another day came, we were running under a high overcast and there was a heavy feel to the sea.

  As the day drew on, the waves turned green with white beards blowing and the sky turned black with clouds. The wind tore at our sheets in gusts and we shortened sail and battened down and prepared to ride her out. Never before had I known such wind or known the world could breed such seas. Hour by hour, we fought it out, our poles bare and a sea anchor over, and though none of us were praying men, pray we did.

  We shipped water and we bailed and we swore and we worked and, somehow, when the storm blew itself out, we were still afloat and somewhat farther along. Yes, farther, for we saw a dark blur on the horizon and when we topped a wave, we saw an island, a brush-covered bit of sand forgotten here in the middle of nothing.

  We slid in through the reefs, conning her by voice and hand, taking it easy because of the bared teeth of coral so close beneath our keel. Lincoln Island, it was, scarcely more than a mile of heaped-up sand and brush, fringed and bordered by reefs. We’d a hope there was water, and we found it near a stunted palm, a brackish pool, but badly needed.

  From there, it was down through the Dangerous Ground, a thousand odd miles of navigator’s nightmare, a wicked tangle of reefs and sandy cays, of islands with tiny tufts of palms, millions of seabirds and fish of all kinds … and the bottom torn out of you if you slacked off for even a minute. But we took that way because it was fastest and because there was small chance we’d be seen.

  Fools? We were that, but sometimes now when the fire is bright on the hearth and there’s rain against the windows and the roof, sometimes I think back and find myself tasting the wind again and getting the good old roll of the sea under me. In my mind’s eye, I can see the water breaking on the coral, and see Limey sitting forward, conning us through, and hear Smoke Bassett, the mulatto from Haiti, singing a song of his island in that deep, grand, melancholy bass of his.

  Yes, it was long ago, but what else have we but memories? For all life is divided into two parts: anticipation and memory, and if we remember richly, we must have lived richly. Only sometimes I think of them, and wonder what would have happened if the story had been different if another hand than mine had written the ending?

  Fools … we were all of that, but a tough, ruddy lot of fools, and it was strange the way we worked as a team; the way we handled the boat and shared our grub and water and no whimper from any man.

  There was Limey, who was medium height and heavy but massively boned, and Long Jack, who was six-three and cadaverous, and the powerful, lazy-talking Smoke, the strongest man of the lot. And me, whom they jokingly called “The Scholar” because I’d stowed a half-dozen books in my sea bag, and because I read from them, sometimes at night when we lay on deck and watched the canvas stretch its dark belly to the wind. Smoke would whet his razor-sharp knife and sing “Shenandoah,” “Rio Grande,” or “High Barbaree.” And we would watch him cautiously and wonder what he had planned for that knife. And wonder what we had planned for each other.

  Then one morning we got the smell of the Borneo coast in our nostrils, and felt the close, hot, sticky heat of it coming up from below the horizon. We saw the mangrove coast out beyond the white snarl of foam along the reefs, then we put our helm over and turned east again, crawling along the coast of Darvel Bay.

  The heat of the jungle reached out to us across the water and there was the primeval something that comes from the jungle, the ancient evil that crawls up from the fetid rottenness of it, and gets into the mind and into the blood.

  We saw a few native craft, but we kept them wide abeam wanting to talk with no one, for our plans were big within us. We got out our stolen diving rig and went to work, checking it over. Johnson was a diver and I’d been down, so it was to be turn and turn about for us … for it might take a bit of time to locate the wreck, and then to get into the cabin once we’d found it.

  We came up along the mangrove coast with the setting sun, and slid through a
narrow passage into the quiet of a lagoon where we dropped our hook and swung to, looking at the long wall of jungle that fronted the shore for miles.

  Have you seen a mangrove coast? Have you come fresh from the sea to a sundown anchorage in a wild and lonely place with the line of the shore lost among twisting, tangling tentacle roots, strangling the earth, reaching out to the very water and concealing under its solid ceiling of green those dark and dismal passages into which a boat might make its way?

  Huge columnar roots, other roots springing from them, and from these, still more roots, and roots descending from branches and under them, black water, silent, un-moving. This we could see, and beyond it, shutting from the interior, a long, low cliff of upraised coral.

  Night then … a moon hung low beyond a corner of the coral cliff … lazy water lapping about the hull … the mutter of breakers on the reef … the cry of a night bird, and then the low, rich tones of Smoke Bassett, singing.

  So we had arrived, four men of the devil’s own choosing, men from the world’s waterfronts, and below us, somewhere in the dark water, was a submerged freighter with fifty thousand dollars in her strongbox.

  Four men … Limey Johnson short, powerful, tough. Tattooed on his hands the words, one to a hand, Hold Fast. A scar across the bridge of his nose, the tip of an ear missing … greasy, unwashed dungarees … and stories of the Blue Funnel boats. What, I wondered, had become of the captain of the sunken ship, and the others who must have known about that money? Limey Johnson had offered no explanation, and we were not inquisitive men. And Long Jack, sprawled on the deck looking up at the stars? Of what was he thinking? Tomorrow? Fifty thousand dollars, and how much he would get of it? Or was he thinking of the spending of it? He was a thin, haggard man with a slow smile that never reached beyond his lips. Competent, untiring … there was a rumor about Macao that he had killed a man aboard a Darwin pearl fisher … he was a man who grew red, but not tan, with a thin, scrawny neck like a buzzard, as taciturn as Johnson was talkative. Staring skyward from his pale gray eyes … at what? Into what personal future? Into what shadowed past?